Public repository of technical case studies decoding how Africa's tech giants and modern platforms handle outages, scaling failures, and production reliability.
A learning resource hub explaining what happens behind the scenes when systems serve tens of thousands of users.
- Overview
- Topics Covered
- Repository Structure
- Example Case Studies
- Who This Repository Is For
- Contributing
- License
OpsDecoded explores the operational challenges that technology platforms face as they grow.
From API outages and database bottlenecks to scaling failures and payment disruptions, each case study breaks down real production scenarios from an engineering perspective.
The goal is to help developers, students, and tech enthusiasts understand how real systems behave under pressure and how engineering teams restore reliability.
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Incidents | Production outages and system failures |
| Scaling | Bottlenecks caused by rapid growth |
| Payments | Reliability challenges in financial systems |
| Reliability | Incident response and operational practices |
| Concepts | Infrastructure and distributed systems fundamentals |
ops-decoded
├─ incidents/
├─ scaling/
├─ payments/
├─ reliability/
├─ concepts/
├─ Templates
├─ CONTRIBUTING.md
└─ README.mdEach directory focuses on a different class of operational challenges commonly encountered in production systems.
| Case Study | Topic |
|---|---|
| API Outage During Traffic Spike | Infrastructure scaling |
| Failed Deployment Causing 500 Errors | Deployment reliability |
| Database Connection Pool Exhaustion | Backend bottlenecks |
| Cache Stampede Incident | Performance engineering |
| Payment Provider Timeout | Distributed system dependencies |
These case studies are written from a technical perspective while remaining accessible to readers who are new to production engineering.
The following case studies are planned for the repository.
Contributions are welcome for any open topic.
Legend:
- ✅ Completed
- 🟡 In progress
- ⚪ Open for contribution
| Status | Case Study | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ | API Outage During Traffic Spike | Infrastructure scaling |
| ⬜ | Failed Deployment Causing 500 Errors | Deployment reliability |
| ⬜ | Mobile Money Payment Provider Timeout | Dependency failures |
| ⬜ | DNS Misconfiguration During Migration | Infrastructure operations |
| ⬜ | Queue Backlog on Salary Day | Background job systems |
| ⬜ | Cache Stampede Incident | Performance engineering |
| ⬜ | CDN Misconfiguration Overloading Origin | Edge caching |
| ⬜ | Database Replication Lag | Data infrastructure |
| ⬜ | Rate Limiting to Stop API Abuse | Security and resilience |
| ⬜ | Third-Party SMS Provider Outage | External dependencies |
OpsDecoded is designed for:
- developers early in their careers
- students learning backend engineering
- engineers transitioning into infrastructure roles
- builders curious about production systems
Contributions are welcome.
If you have ideas for new cases studies, improvements, or corrections, please open a pull request or issue. Please do check the open topics above.
Please do refer to CONTRIBUTIONS for the details on how to contribute.
This repository is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.